Morning Feature – Conspiracy Theories, Part I: “Who Is In His Place?”

In a Greek tragedy, the fall of the king was almost always the will of the gods. In contemporary America we often substitute … a conspiracy. (More)

Conspiracy Theories, Part I: “The Gods Are Abandoned”

This week Morning Feature marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy with a look at the enduring attraction of conspiracy theories. Today we’ll explore Karl Popper’s view that such theories fill a teleological gap in modern culture. Tomorrow we’ll see several kinds of theories, including conspiracies of convenience and conflation. Saturday we’ll conclude with why we must be wary of conspiracy theories, especially those that affirm our deeply-held beliefs.

Once Upon a Complex

Even if you’ve never read it, you probably know the core conflict in Sophocles’ classic tragedy Oedipus Rex. It is the basis for the psychoanalytic term Oedipus complex, Sigmund Freud’s theorized stage of childhood development where sons want to possess their mothers, and daughters their fathers.

In the play’s backstory, King Laius of Thebes has been warned that he will be killed by his own child, and he tells Queen Jocasta to kill their newborn son Oedipus. Jocasta passes the order to one of her servants, who instead sends the boy away to be raised in another city. As the play opens, the Oracle warns Oedipus that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Not wanting to harm the couple who raised him, Oedipus flees to Thebes, where he kills Laius and marries Jocasta, as the Oracle prophesied. The gods send a plague on the city and, when the servant reveals that Oedipus is Jocasta’s long-lost son and their marriage is the cause of the plague, Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself.

Teleology is the search for and/or presumption of “final causes,” and it often proposes causes beyond those we immediately recognize. Thus, a teleological argument presumes that there are no random events, no mere coincidences. In teleological analysis, everything happens by design.

I shall call this theory the conspiracy theory of society. This theory, which is more primitive than most forms of theism, is akin to Homer’s theory of society. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened on the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of this theism, a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything. It comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?” His place is then filled by various powerful men and groups – sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and all the evils from which we suffer.

Some such theories seem to bubble up spontaneously, appearing roughly simultaneously in many different social networks; others are initiated and spread, quite intentionally, by conspiracy entrepreneurs who profit directly or indirectly from propagating their theories…. Some conspiracy entrepreneurs are entirely sincere; others are interested in money or power, or in achieving some general social goal.

“He is facing political oblivion in November of 1963. He has the Senate investigation looking into Bobby Baker, who is his bagman in the U.S. Senate. He has the Justice Department looking into his wheeling and dealing with Billie Sol Estes, a flamboyant Texas con man. There are nine Time-Life investigative reporters on Lyndon Johnson, and they have a cover story coming out on the Saturday after the assassination on his epic corruption, his corruption of biblical proportions. So he’s a man staring into the abyss.” For the record, Stone claims that Malcolm Wallace, “a hit man for Lyndon Johnson,” was the gunman, not Lee Harvey Oswald.

But don’t call that a conspiracy theory:

“I don’t call it conspiracy purposefully because conspiracy is a pejorative term. It is used to denigrate those who question the government’s version of events,” he said.

4 Comments

winterbanyan
on November 21, 2013 at 8:42 am

I just love these conspiracy theories about the assassination of JFK. I enjoy reading them. I don’t believe them, but I share a feeling that I’m sure many share: a need for a reason, and a sense we don’t know everything.

Into that gap, if you allow it, can move some fascinating conspiracy theories. We humans have a serious problem with the randomness of life. We want everything tidily tied up. This one will never have a neat bow on it.

The killing of Oswald didn’t help, but even had he gone to trial, our difficulty with randomness would simply have produced other reasons and theories. Because we need them.

NCrissieB
on November 21, 2013 at 9:01 am

This is a key insight, winterbanyan:

[…] our difficulty with randomness would simply have produced other reasons and theories.

Real life rarely offers tidy stories. A tornado misses this house (“god kept us safe!”) but kills everyone in the next house (god didn’t like them?). A cascading series of ordinary human errors and bad weather don’t seem to balance the scales of a tragic airline crash (“I heard someone saw a missile”).

Worse, the more thoroughly an event is investigated, the higher the likelihood that you’ll find contradictory pieces of evidence: a witness who says “four shots” instead of the more common report of three. And if police found only three shell casings, clearly they’re in on the conspiracy because “that witness heard four shots!” Explaining that witnesses routinely disagree on basic details of any traumatic event makes you “gullible” … or perhaps even a “government shill.”

All because real life just isn’t as tidy as we wish it were.

Good morning! ::hugggggs::

addisnana
on November 21, 2013 at 9:07 am

In the absence of an answer that feels right or complete, we make stuff up to fill in the gaps. Conspiracy theories are usually close to home and sometimes that makes them harder to deal with. JFK is part of our national memory and we still need a better explanation for his assassination that “Sh!# Happens.”

Xi and his tribe of Bushmen are “living well off the land” in the Kalahari Desert. They are happy because the gods have provided plenty of everything, and no one in the tribe has any wants. One day, a Coca-Cola bottle is thrown out of an airplane and falls to earth unbroken. Initially, this strange artifact seems to be another “present” from the gods — Xi’s people find many uses for it. But unlike anything that they have had before, there is only one glass bottle to go around. They soon find themselves experiencing envy, anger, and even violence.

The ways that the tribe tries to explain the Coke bottle seem ridiculous and funny to an American audience. Yet most of our conspiracy theories have some version of the Coke bottle.

Is it ‘the gods’ who are crazy or is it us?

NCrissieB
on November 21, 2013 at 9:18 am

This is a surprisingly complex question, addisnana:

Is it ‘the gods’ who are crazy or is it us?

Humans could infer causes had an evolutionary advantage over those who could not. So did humans who could tell convincing stories. Conspiracy theories spring from the intersection of those two traits.